The Applesauce is a macOS exclusive tool that has a contingent of dedicated users. While I have not imaged a wide sample set of Apple II and 800k Mac disks specifically, from my current experience the Greaseweazle is plenty capable of reading them. I would speculate the author was trying to use an included diskdef(a flux to binary decoding definition) for an incompatible disk. The Zone Bit Recording[2] Apple drives use is irrelevant when you increase the sample rate of the controller to accomplish the same thing. Similarly C64 disk drives are also ZBR but change the clock rate instead of media speed. So do not think that this means you need multiple drives and controllers when getting into floppy imaging, you can use standard PC drives with a Greaseweazle to read and write Apple II and Mac disks as well as almost anything else.

I have opened an issue on their github page for this site to seek clarification on this.

[1] https://smackernews.com/item/39495973 HN [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_bit_recording

Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies. The sound, the smell, the texture, the stickers, the formatting, the wast free space, ... as much as retail therapy is a thing, I think that was floppy therapy.

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy

Some things I learned:

1. Different drives could read different sectors. I am not exactly sure why, but some disks would show bad sectors when read from one drive, but would have a different set of bad sectors when read from a different one. I had 5-6 different drives I was using (I bought a bunch of used drives, they are pulled from old hardware and resold). I think it likely has something to do with the heads being slightly misaligned or something, so they would struggle with different sectors.

What I would do is scan a disk with one drive, and if I found any bad sectors, I would re-scan with a different drive. I would repeat this process until I had at least one good scan of each sector. I would then pull the missing sectors in one scan from a scan that succeeded on that sector, and would patch together an entire image.

2. I didn’t realize how varied the formats are for disks I had. I remember single vs double sided, but there were quite a few other variations I found in my collection.

3. If you hang out with computer nerds of a certain age, you are going to be surprised by how many of them still have a collection of old floppies that they can’t access anymore. I had so many requests to help archive many different collections!

Before the floppy disks we were using cassettes... with our TO7 (circa 1983). It was slow by our current measure, but as kids we had time, I guess. The TO7 had even a lightpen to point at the CRC screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_TO7

My parents attic has still some of my old floppy disks, and even maybe some cassettes.

Also, using an 80 track drive to read a 40 track disk works most of the time. But if you get any read errors, trying with a 40 track drive solves a lot of them!

Lastly, have multiple drives. A read error on one drive might not be a problem on another drive.

I recovered more than a thousand floppies some years ago. And learned that read errors in most cases are not irrecoverable. Try another drive, rub the diskette's edges - the two things that fixed most problems.

Not all red or unreadable sectors necessarily indicate failure. Many copy-protected disks include intentionally malformed sectors that cannot be read by standard logic.

How they know? ;)

The chance that one would have anything important on a floppy that is not already backed up in the year of 2026 must be close to zero.